Red Hat calls for patent reforms and creates Fedora Foundation

Red Hat has announced a number of initiatives designed to remove barriers to innovation and strengthen the open source movement. Firstly, the company will be creating the "Fedora Foundation", with the intention of moving Fedora project development work and copyright ownership of contributed code to that Foundation.

"The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software. Development will be done in a public forum ... By using this more open process, we hope to provide an operating system more in line with the ideals of free software and more appealing to the open source community," the Fedora Project Web site says.

Additionally, Red Hat will engage with the European Parliament to amend the Computer-Implemented Inventions directive. Thirdly, Red Hat will work to protect open source by working to create a Software Patent Commons, which will enable a future of collaboration among software technologists, free from worry about patents.